There was a lot of discussion generated around my earlier post, about the Invisible Website Syndrome. Besides the comments and discussions on the blog here, there were many interactions on other forums like LinkedIn, where the content was shared. It brought forth several perspectives on the subject. I am summarizing my thoughts now, with the added learning from those interactions.

At the outset, let’s ask the tough question? Do you really need a lot of traffic to your website at all? Do you need high visibility for your website? Maybe not. Yes, indeed, you need good visibility for your content. But that is not the same as good visibility for your website. Simply because content is mobile. Your content could be delivered to your readers / viewers via RSS feeds, widgets, embedded video players, and you may even choose to give summaries or full content replicated at higher traffic locations like social networking sites. That being the case, your content is visible, but not necessarily your website. What you need to be sure about, is to ensure the mobility of your content. Don’t constrain it.

There is no getting away from the fact that your content has to be good. Whether through advertising, whether through social media, whether through search engines, whether by putting a gun on someone’s head, whichever way, if you get traffic to your content, that is only the beginning. Will they stay and read? Will they want to see further updates? Will they Digg you, will they tag you in Delicious? Will they share your URL? Will they tweet and retweet your URL? All of those decisions impact further visibility of your content. And those decisions, in turn, depend on the quality of your content. So there is no getting away from creating interesting, relevant, useful content for your target prospects.

This is akin to the customer acquisition process in a store. The first time customer acquisition cost is high. But it is justified by the life time value of the customer (the repeat purchases, where there is no spend on customer acquisition anymore) or the referral cases that the customer brings. If those repeat purchases and referrals do not happen, then the customer acquisition cost is typically a loss to the company. Same is with generating visibility of your content. Good quality content, that is mobile enough, will ensure that amortization of the ‘customer acquisition cost’.

So what become the key pointers to a strategy, once you have good content and you have set up the mobility factor on your content?

1. Ensure that the basic HTML code (typically) of the pages is done “correctly”. There are many tools available to test the compliance of the code, and it is a good idea to ensure those efforts are taken. This is because, a page can easily look right on a browser in spite of the HTML not being correct. This is on account of your browser ‘covering up the errors’ and showing the page correctly. But for a search engine bot that may come to crawl the pages into the search engine, may not be able to move into your page and ‘read it’ well, if there are HTML errors. And that will prevent your pages getting into the search engines. It is a very fundamental point but I mention it here, only on account of the number of pages that we see, where this has been ignored.
2. Ensure that the page is basically done well, in terms of on-page SEO effort. A large part of the on-page SEO effort is good common sense, e.g. giving relevant page title, giving a descriptive URL to the page, using relevant H1 links, putting proper meta tags for keywords and description, etc. An experienced HTML programmer should usually get these aspects right, and should not need specialized SEO effort. Doing this makes the site fundamentally search-engine friendly. It does not ensure immediate search engine placement, but it is a start.
3. Having done all this, and having got your site ‘ready’, now is the time to get started on the process of visibility generation. A good start is to send out the URL to friends, family, business associates, etc. who may be interested in having a look at the website. Several of them may come and take a look and few of them may end up bookmarking these, at any of their favorite sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, etc. This enables sharing of the content at those bookmarking sites, with a possibility of discovery from there. And hence traffic.
4. It is also assumed that you are already active on social networking sites, Twitter, etc. Also that you are part of relevant groups or communities on these social networking sites. If you are not, then it is a good idea to become a member and then mingle in those relevant groups and communities. As one who has been a member for a while and been a participant in the groups and communities, it is alright then, to share the URL of your new website, with the group / community. You can also tweet about it. It is a good idea to share a small note on why it would be good for people to go and see your site (“what’s in it for them?”). You may also request folks to ‘RT’ your tweet about your website.
5. Once you have shared it with your friends and groups on Social Networking sites, and you have tweeted the URL, you have to hope that it spreads further. You have to remember and appreciate this quote of Mike Arauz: “If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand, it’s not because I like your brand, but because I like my friends”. If your content is good, your friends will tell their friends and so on. You also have to hope many of the viewers coming in via these viral means, will also end up bookmarking and tagging your site, and the spread of your site will increase further, through those tools.
6. I did mention in my previous post how tough it would be to penetrate the SERPs in Google, on account of the sheer congestion. However there are opportunities left out elsewhere, e.g. a) you can run a corporate blog, and there are better chances of it getting linked in, either at Google itself (thanks to Wordpress, for example), b) besides just posting links to social networking groups / communities, you could consider getting a social networking profile for the business itself, c) put up pictures related to the business, with necessary descriptions and tags, on sites like Flickr and Picasa – those could get searched faster and better, and drive traffic back to the rest of your content, d) do the same with videos – create good corporate videos and plug them into variety of video feed sites like YouTube, Metacafe, DailyMotion and others, with your branded channel, proper tags, descriptions etc. Like the images, this will also drive traffic back to the rest of your content.
7. Last, but certainly not the least (and I must mention this, before the SEOs strangle me!), there is the SEO factor. Once you start generating traffic inwards to your website from these various places, and such traffic is coming in, on basis of specific keyword phrases, it is a good idea to reinforce the site’s standing for those very keywords, with a structured SEO effort, including off-page activities like link building and others. This works to cement your place in the higher positions on the search engines.

By no means are the above suggestions an exhaustive list. But these are all tried and tested, and these can be a good set to get started. Good ground will be covered only by meticulously following these guidelines. Once you get going with this set and develop the initial visibility, a higher level of effort may be put to sustain the visibility, and grow it further.

Do you see any major fundamentals missed out of this list? Share them via comments, then.

Few weeks back, we considered the option to outsource some routine, simple web development work. With that in mind, we started interacting with web development companies, all of whom had some stature, viz. they were at least 50-100 person teams, and they had a client list that was at least in 3 figures.

In my meetings with them, I would ask them to name their best website work, which I could review. Just so as to understand how good are the sites which they consider to be their best. And as I saw those “best” sites of theirs, all of them ‘looked good’ (typical flash work, great graphics, etc.), but none – repeat none – were SEO friendly. When I queried them about this fact, they defensively claimed that “oh, these clients just wanted a web presence and were not concerned about SEO”.

What is the meaning of “just wanted a web presence”?? And ALL of them had the same defense??

So I went to the next step – asked them to show me their OWN websites. The company website of the web development business. Disaster! None of them would ever get a lead from being found on a search engine!!

That sadly is the story of the day. When web development companies and their clients are in such deep mess, think about what can be the status of a typical new business, going out and putting up its website?!

Indeed, this is a phase of the ‘invisible website‘.

Let me drive home the point. Say you are in the business of diamond jewelry, and spurred by all the noise on going digital, you decide to put your business online, and create a website. Now you would need to get your target customers to visit this site, right? And you would expect search engines to drive traffic to your new website, right?

Well, that’s not going to happen!! WHY?

Try searching for ‘diamond jewelry‘ on Google. You get nearly 20 million matches.

Okay, so you are in India. So you say that you don’t care for the entire world to find you. If someone is searching for ‘diamond jewerly India’ and if you can get found that is good enough for you. Well, ‘diamond jewlery India‘ returns around 800,000 matches!

Compromise time. “Let me get Mumbai at least”, you feel. Next stop ‘diamond jewelry mumbai‘. About 335,000 matches!! Yeah, you would wonder about it, no? I am sure there are not so many jewelers selling diamond jewelry in Mumbai, but the search matches are surely there!!

Is there ANY hope at all? Let’s try ‘diamond ring 0.2 ct mumbai‘. Finally – a smaller number of search results! But still around 18,500.

Now you get the concept of “the invisible website”?

So how do you STILL make an impact with a website. Here is where Social Media comes to the rescue. Whether you reach the entire world or not, you certainly want to reach a far higher number of people beyond those that get your business card and who want to then, check your site out.

So the subject of my next post will be (and leave your thoughts about this in the comments): “So how exactly can Social Media make the invisible site visible??”